August 16, 2003: DDoS attack against starts.August 15, 2003: The number of infected systems is reported at 423,000.(Sophos, a variant of MSBlast and W32/RpcSpybot-A, a totally new worm that used the same exploit) August 13, 2003: Two new worms appear and begin to spread. August 12, 2003: The number of infected systems is reported at 30,000.August 11, 2003, evening: Antivirus and security firms issued alerts to run Windows Update.August 11, 2003: Symantec Antivirus releases a rapid release protection update.August 11, 2003: Original version of the worm appears on the Internet.Sometime prior to August 11, 2003: Other viruses using the RPC exploit exist.issues an alert to be on the lookout for malware exploiting the RPC bug. July 25, 2003: xFocus releases information on how to exploit the RPC bug that Microsoft released the July 16 patch to fix.July 21, 2003: CERT/CC suggests also blocking ports 139 and 445.July 17, 2003: CERT/CC releases a warning and suggests blocking port 135.Around July 16, 2003: White hat hackers create proof-of-concept code verifying that the unpatched systems are vulnerable.At the same time they also released a bulletin describing the exploit. July 16, 2003: Microsoft releases a patch that would protect users from the yet unknown MSBlast.July 5, 2003: Timestamp for the patch that Microsoft releases on the 16th.This method was only used after 200,000 RPC DCOM attacks - the form that MSBlast used.) (Welchia used the same exploit as MSBlast but had an additional method of propagation that was fixed in this patch. May 28, 2003: Microsoft releases a patch that would protect users from an exploit in WebDAV that Welchia used.HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\ windows auto update=msblast.exe The worm also creates the following registry entry so that it is launched every time Windows starts: This is a message to Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and the target of the worm. The second reads:īilly gates why do you make this possible ? Stop making money This message gave the worm the alternative name of Lovesan. The worm's executable, MSBlast.exe, contains two messages. Microsoft temporarily shut down the targeted site to minimize potential effects from the worm. The damage to Microsoft was minimal as the site targeted was, rather than, to which the former was redirected. The worm was programmed to start a SYN flood against port 80 of if the system date is after August 15 and before December 31 and after the 15th day of other months, thereby creating a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) against the site. These are the most well-known exploits of the original flaw in RPC, but there were in fact another 12 different vulnerabilities that did not see as much media attention. Four versions have been detected in the wild. This allowed the worm to spread without users opening attachments simply by spamming itself to large numbers of random IP addresses. The worm spreads by exploiting a buffer overflow discovered by the Polish security research group Last Stage of Delirium in the DCOM RPC service on the affected operating systems, for which a patch had been released one month earlier in MS03-026 and later in MS03-039. The author of the original A variant remains unknown.Īccording to court papers, the original Blaster was created after security researchers from the Chinese group Xfocus reverse engineered the original Microsoft patch that allowed for execution of the attack. In September 2003, Jeffrey Lee Parson, an 18-year-old from Hopkins, Minnesota, was indicted for creating the B variant of the Blaster worm he admitted responsibility and was sentenced to an 18-month prison term in January 2005. Filtering by ISPs and widespread publicity about the worm curbed the spread of Blaster. Once a network (such as a company or university) was infected, it spread more quickly within the network because firewalls typically did not prevent internal machines from using a certain port. The rate that it spread increased until the number of infections peaked on August 13, 2003. The worm was first noticed and started spreading on August 11, 2003. Hex dump of the Blaster worm, showing a message left for Microsoft founder Bill Gates by the programmerīlaster (also known as Lovsan, Lovesan, or MSBlast) was a computer worm that spread on computers running operating systems Windows XP and Windows 2000 during August 2003.
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